Nuova Luce
2014-2016
— Photographic series developed within Napoli, Nuova Luce, curated by Marcello De Masi, a project bringing together multiple artistic positions addressing the city.
My contribution focuses on industrial archaeology and abandoned sites as structural elements of the urban landscape, shifting attention toward overlooked urban conditions.
I should create a work like this every day, it is just a matter of good will, or if I will not do it, someone else will, and, I hope, in a deeper and more complete way, focusing any of the inhabited places in Italy.
We find these words in the first pages of Cesare Zavattini’s great book Un Paese (A Country), published in 1955. This work combines literature and photography and features a collaboration between Zavattini himself, who worked on the texts, and the American photographer Paul Strand, for the images. It is deeply rooted in the spirit of Italian Neorealism, and in narrating the reality of the small village of Luzzara it also provides a testimony to the connection and mutual influence between American and Italian art.
This is part of the legacy I am taking up, it is the bequest of two great men whose work remains necessary and relevant to the present day. Their work is only one of the many projects that have actualised a specific gaze on reality, world and life; a gaze I want to apply to the city of Naples. A gaze of love.
My attempt consists in inserting myself into a tradition, understanding the past and its reasons as the only way to realise poetic innovation and recount the spirit of time, that flows through the instants we are given to live. Hence, I understand artistic creation and representation as acts of testimony and memory, which, starting from the past and inserted in a present that constantly runs away and evolves, can be useful for future choices.
Marcello De Masi
Curator and photographer
from the critical essay "Napoli, Nuova Luce".
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The photographs of Giovanni Scotti seem to be “in search” of a lost meaning, or one never acquired, but, “reading” them carefully, they reveal to us that a meaning that can be lost is not truly significant.
Through the observation of these empty places and the disappearance/absence of the human, it raises moral questions, with the stylistic delicacy typical of the genre of Fable.
By showing us these images, it tells us without saying anything. It never emphasizes its message, but almost erases it, blinds it. Its critique is intertwined, behind a lightness that is often allegorical. Everything in his images is Fable, but without an explicit moral: it is only readable by reflection.
Chiara Zocchi
Writer and journalist
Excerpt from the critical essay "Places in search of a (seemingly) lost meaning", published in the catalogue Triennale #6 Photographie et Architecture Paradis Infernaux / Enfers Paradisiaques.